Subprime Primer: stick figures explain economic collapse

The Subprime Primer is a 45-slide presentation that uses stick figures to explain the present economic meltdown as the world slides into depression fuelled by $500 trillion worth of toxic derivatives. Link (via Making Light)

• [Anonymous]

  The third slide is being used in a magazine advertisement by The Bridge Network. My coworker just noticed it in the Winter 2008 edition of Dental Practice Magazine (page 37).

  Is that legal?

• [ill lich]

  Remember when the western world rejoiced as “capitalism defeated communism” in the early 90′s?

  All it takes is for the engines of capital to get greedy and lazy again to make communism look really good to the slowly growing masses of homeless, unemployed, and starving. Maybe I speak too soon, or maybe I am remarkably prescient. Time will tell.

• [certron]

  #6: Prescient? You may even be too optimistic.

  Slightly off topic, but a nice bit of analysis on how we got to this point. I had heard an interesting analysis that went sort of like this:

  Enron is related to the foreclosure/ mortgage/ credit crisis. When the Enron share price collapsed, it caused the banks to lose a lot of money, as well as prompting a lowering of the federal interest rate to try and get things moving again.

  Since the banks couldn’t make as much money on their loans with the lower rate, they started to come up with some other ways to make money. One of these was to create exotic mortgages and offer them to people who would not have qualified/ been considered too risky in the past.

  This strategy was working out so well that the brokers started fudging things and getting people more house/ mortgage than they needed. Things were going fine for a while. Then two things happened: the banks decided to roll these mortgages into ‘mortgage-backed securities’ and start trading them around.

  When the rates started adjusting and people started defaulting, the value of these mortgage-backed securities became slightly… unknown. They certainly weren’t worth more than they were before the defaulting, and the banks aren’t going to be able to trade a security if they don’t know the value. Crash, boom, bang, the securities aren’t worth as much (it would be lucky if anyone knew what they are worth at all), credit gets harder to come by, massive MASSIVE transfer of wealth away from the people who were given these mortgages (and who likely could least afford it) and the result is the situation we find ourselves in today.

  While it doesn’t seem to have been publicized much, the FDIC issued a clarification about their policy for determining the insurance value of a failed bank and has been increasing its personnel lately, just in case something happens…

• [Antinous]

  Foreclosure porn.

• [Protonk]

  “What do I tell my investors?”

  “tell them you fucked up”

  “fuck you”

  “fuck you!”

  riotous laughter. :)

• [mashei]

  I prefer this video to a crude stick show:
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM

• [Chief Jimbo]

  I have it on good sources that this was actually made at Countrywide Financial

• [alanv2v]

  Another take, inspired by the above.

  http://www.verb2verbe.com/comics/taleoftwoworlds.aspx

• [Jeff]

  What do you tell your investors? Tell them they should have bought European index funds! Go Eruo Go! You know, there is Always a way to profit from the misfortune of others. As the Euro climbs to an all time high against the dollar, the opportunity to make money in currancy trading is also at an all time high.